Paul Ostrowski

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You have known that eyebrow for eleven months.

Pale line through the left one, a hyphen where the hair doesn't grow, and you learned it the way you learn a hymn — by hearing it every week whether you meant to or not. You were the one who signed up to run the sound board for the eight o'clock, and then the ten o'clock too, because the eight o'clock was not enough. From the booth at the back of St. Casimir's you had a clean angle on him for fifty minutes at a stretch, and you used all fifty. Father Paul Ostrowski. Thirty-seven. Five foot eight in his good shoes and honest about it. The clerical shirt straining a little at the second button, the belt doing its patient work, the soft push of him under black cotton every time he lifted his arms — and you cataloguing all of it while a hundred people thought about God.

Not lean. Not once, in eleven months, ever anything like lean. He'd been narrower in the photo on the parish office wall — 2019, ribbon-cutting, a thinner face and a thinner jaw — and he made a joke about it from the pulpit once. *The rectory casseroles are a spiritual discipline and I have failed it.* Everyone laughed. You did not laugh. You sat in the booth with your hands on the faders and thought: twenty-five pounds, and every single one of them an improvement, and you are a sick person for keeping the count.

Afterward he stands in the vestibule. That is the part you built your week around. He stands by the bulletin rack under the fluorescent tube that buzzes, and he shakes hands, and Mrs. Wierzbicki tells him about her knee for six minutes, and his belly rests warm against the front of his shirt while he listens like the knee is the only knee. The wedding band catches the light when he reaches for someone's hand. It always catches the light. That is his wife's ring and you have looked at it a thousand times and never once been able to look away first.

You never said anything. What was there to say. There was a woman named Ellen with her own set of keys to his life and a Tuesday-night meatloaf, and there was you, coiling cables.

Thursday nights the parish gym is open. Men over thirty-five, half-court, a game that is mostly standing around and complaining about ankles. He plays in a navy T-shirt gone soft at the neck and grey sweatpants with the drawstring loose, and when he runs the shirt clings and rides and every ungenerous thing you ever thought about your own hunger comes back to you sideways.

You went up for the same rebound. That is all. Nobody's fault, nobody's foul. Your temple met his forehead with a sound like a dropped book, and the gym went white, and the floor came up.

And then you're on one knee on the varnished pine.

You feel your own hand — his hand, this hand, thick fingers, the band snug on the third one — come up to the forehead and press. Blood beating there. The overheads hum green-yellow above you. The eyes take a second to agree on where the far wall is, and you let them, because you are busy. You are inside the count. Belly folded over the waistband of the sweatpants, resting on the thigh, warm. Chest heavier than any chest you've had. Air going in and out of a body that carries twenty-five pounds it did not use to and does not mind. Left hand flat on the knee. The ring.

You wince, because it does ache. You blink, and the room comes straight. And you sit up.

Too fast. Too smooth. A man who just took a skull to the head doesn't do that — doesn't rise like a thing pleased to be standing. Somebody says *whoa, Father, sit a sec* and you say, in the voice, the actual voice, the one that says *the peace of the Lord be with you always*: "No, I'm fine. I'm good." Then you look at the hands in front of you, turning them over, and they are.

You have one day.

You do not waste it on the obvious. You almost do — the shower after, in the rectory, you almost do, and then you stand there with the water running and your palm flat on the round of the belly, feeling it move when you breathe, and that is enough. That is more than eleven months gave you. You towel him off and get him into the black shirt and the collar and you do up the second button, the one that strains, and you look in the fogged mirror at the scar in the eyebrow from the inside of the face that owns it.

He has a funeral at eleven. You take it. You know the words — you've heard him say them enough — and where you don't know them the body does; the hands know when to lift, the voice knows the fall of the line. Afterward, the vestibule. Sodium light coming grey through the door glass, rain outside. You stand where he stands and let them come to you and you hold each hand in both of yours a beat longer than he would, and Mrs. Wierzbicki's knee is worse, and you listen. You listen like the knee is the only knee in the world, because that is the thing you loved and you want to know what it costs.

It costs a lot. That's what you find out. It's tiring, being wanted by two hundred people who don't want anything from you but that.

Ellen makes chicken. She says *you got clocked and you didn't call me*, and touches the eyebrow with her thumb — the old scar, not today's bruise — and you sit very still and let her, because it is her thumb and her scar to touch. You are not going to steal anything from her. You eat the chicken. You are astonished at how good it is to be full inside this body, how the belt gives and the shirt pulls and none of it is a problem here, none of it, and you understand for the first time that he has never once been unhappy about it and you were the only one keeping the count.

Late, you go out and sit on the brownstone stoop. Wet street, sodium light lying orange along the parked cars, the smell of rain on warm stone. You put your hands on the round of your knees. You turn the ring on the third finger, once, and put it back exactly.

You say, out loud, in his voice, to nobody: "You're all right. You were always all right."

Somewhere behind that, tomorrow, he will wake up with a headache and a strange full feeling of a day well spent and no memory of spending it, and Ellen will say *you were sweet last night*, and he will believe her, because why wouldn't he.

Sunday you'll be in the booth again. Faders under your hands. Fifty clean minutes of that eyebrow.

You'll manage.